I can’t quite figure out why the three leading eBook companies make it so hard to find books on the iPad.
The other day my daughter wanted a princess book so I opened up iBooks on the iPad and searched. I could search for books in the store, but, much to my surprise, I could not search by category or price. This left us with a ton of search results that we didn’t want.
Then I hopped over to the Kindle app and it was even worse. They don’t even have a way to find other Kindle books. It just amazes me that Amazon has no way for iOS users to search the Kindle store from within the Kindle application. Even a link to Amazon.com would be better than nothing.
The third book app I tried was the Nook. Once again it includes no way of browsing the Nook bookstore.
I’m not so sure why companies don’t make searching bookstores easier from within their own apps. Everyone makes book apps, but then fall short when it comes to finding other books that might interest the user. Isn’t that where you’d make your money? Seems like a no brainer to me.
Amazon and B&N are forbidden from embedding store access (or even a link to their store) inside their native iOS apps by Apples terms of service. Apple iBooks, on the other hand, have no excuse for the lameness. Amazon also has a pretty great kindle store tailored for the iPad at https://read.amazon.com/ (click on “store” in the top right after the HTML5 app loads).
Sir I don’t know if you did not hear about this but when Apple changed their digital content terms they made it so that Apple gets thirty percent of all in app purchases. Amazon and NOOK both decided that not to allow that functionality in their apps because of this. You can still search kindle books in the amazon mobile app but to make purchases you must use a browser.
It still sucks though.
Because apple wants a share if they sell books through their apps. They don’t want that.
Wow. Thanks for all the info. I didn’t realize all the rules Apple had in place. Makes more sense now.